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    Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
    Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
    Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
    Audiobook49 hours

    Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

    Written by Allan Gurganus

    Narrated by Barbara McCulloh

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy's story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction. Author bio: Allan Gurganus is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a finalist of the PEN/Faulkner Award. Adaptations of his fiction have earned four Emmys. He lives in a small town in North Carolina.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 15, 2018
    ISBN9781501971174
    Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

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    Reviews for Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

    3.5/5

    253 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      One of my favorite novels.
    • 2/5
      Lucy at the age of 15 marries Capt Marsden, a 50 year old Confederate veteran of the Civil War. He proceeds to get her pregnant continually for years until she has nine children. He is a traveling livestock dealer who is rarely home. Her friend Castalia, a former slave of Marsden, helps her through her many trials.Through Lucy we learn how the Capt. enlisted in the Confederate Army at the age of 13 and some of the traumatic experiences that shaped the strange man he was, how Castalia was brought to America to be a slave, and the strange experiences Lucy had raising her family in the South while married to a man who was still living his experiences in the War.Capt. shot and then tried to save the life of Union soldier to whom he promised to return a heirloom watch to the soldier's New England family. He didn't because he fell in, love with the watch. He went to war with his best friend who he saw killed. He was at Appomattox for the final moments. When he returned to his Mother and their plantation, he found Sherman's men had burned it to the ground and his Mother was badly burned and his slaves had fled.This a sprawling epic of the tragedy that became the lives of many in the South because of the War. It took me a long time to read this novel because parts of it lacked interest for me and took away from the main narrative. There were some fascinating sections especially Castalia's story of how she came to America which read somewhat differently than other tales of this trip that I have read. Another well written section was the Capt.'s time in battle. The descriptions of life in the Confederate Army were gut wrenching.
    • 3/5
      I struggled through 210 pages of this 718-page doorstop before calling it quits. An aging child-soldier marries a blonde child-bride, a reflection of the towheaded boyhood pal killed during the Civil War. You, the reader, are the stand-in for the silent reporter of infinite patience and a gross of blank tapes as the now elderly woman talks . . . and talks . . . and talks. While her anecdotes are satisfying as stories, the book meanders through the characters' lives, interspersed with the old woman's present, in a way that detracted from the whole. Her crustiness and regional diction finally became too irritating for me to continue.Overall, probably not a bad book, but I just ran out of patience.
    • 2/5
      Gave up around p. 20GurganusSubstance: First-person pseudo-memoir cum interview of nonagenarian widow of last living Confederate veteran (having married the 50+ bachelor at age 15). Gurganus tries to emulate a crusty, humorous old woman, but I didn't feel persuaded.
    • 3/5
      As others have noted, the book is great up until about page 300. And then it sort of swerves off the road. I lost interest.
    • 4/5
      Well, after slogging through this book, I can say that the oldest living confederate widow really does tell all! Lucy talks about her husband's experiences in the civil war, her mother in law's plantation, her friend Castalia's abduction from Africa, her own childhood, her parents' childhoods, life in her small North Carolina town, etc. And yet, cutting through all this narrative, what exactly is this book telling us? That slavery is wrong? That wives and mothers aren't properly respected? That war has a crippling effect not only on veterans but society in general? Okay, fine. But did we really need 700 pages to reach those conclusions? It's too much. The book is overdone with parentheticals and wayward reminisces. Picture a piece of cloth being embroidered on over and over again until it's too heavy to be practical. That is essentially what Gurganus has done with Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. And yet, even though it seems like Lucy has told us every single detail of her life, there are some facets of her character that remain unexplored, like her bisexuality and lack of personal religion. It's like Gurganus wants us to infer these things, which is okay, but he plainly doesn't expect his readers to be smart enough to infer other things, since he bangs us over the head with repeated stories and themes over and over again. In the end, Confederate Widow is readable and engaging enough, but since there are so many ingredients in the mix, coming away from it, I just don't know what to think of it.
    • 5/5
      A young girl is married to a much older confederate soldier (after the war). The story follows her life and relationship with him and with their black maid. funny, poignant, one of my all time favorite books.
    • 5/5
      One of the best books--ever
    • 2/5
      How did I miss this when it came out? I actually read fiction then! I might have loved it! Of course, I did finish it. I did care a bit about the characters. So maybe I should give it another chance to earn a star. But it has no brain, it has no blood, it has no anima! How can I love that? It is the boy you dated just to piss off your mother, even though his endless stupidity bored you to tears. There are smart bad boys. Go find one of those instead. In nonfiction.